[Thorzdad]

Some good friends of mine have started a small business and asked me to do their logo and letterhead. Not a problem. Now, however, they would really like to have a Word template of the letterhead design. I've actually never made a letterhead template for Word, and all the instructions I'm finding online don't exactly work with the parameters of this particular design.

Details of the design...
The letterhead design they want features a graphic running full-length down the left side of the page. This graphic includes their logo, which sticks further out into the page at the top. Across the bottom of the page is the contact info. Because of the full-length graphics, I've opted to simply create a full-page .png for insertion into the Word doc.

How I need the template to work...
They only want the graphics to appear on the first page. Following pages should be blank. However, the first page needs to have more restricted margins set, because of the graphics. All following pages should have more normal margins.

I've played with simply inserting the graphic into the document (with text set to run over the top) and set the margins to accommodate the graphics. This works great until I add a following page. I can't get a second page to accept margins different from the first page. There's also the problem that the background image isn't locked, so the user can move the thing accidentally.

I've inserted the image into the header (which locks it down) You can scale it to 100% so it covers the whole page even though the header is at the top. I still run into issues formatting for following pages.

Soooo...Anyone have any helpful tips for me to accomplish this task and make my friends happy? This is in Word 2008, btw. I'm sure I'm doing this wrong and missing some double-secret toggles somewhere. I generally stay away from Word at all costs.

Thanks.

[andi*pandi]

urg. I've done this, but it was ages ago and memory is foggy. I'll check some files tomorrow.

[andi*pandi]

The template I found that I made back in the day used headers and footers to place the graphics. We had a left column of names that we needed to have, and I adjusted the margins around this. Second pages also like you, went back to regular margins.

If you want, PM and I can email you the template for an idea.

[andi*pandi]

ooh, found the instructions:

HOW TO CREATE A WORD TEMPLATE FOR LETTERHEAD

1. Open the InDesign version of the letterhead you want (K or CMYK)
2. Export page as EPS
3. Open EPS in Illustrator
4. FILE > Save for Microsoft Office (this will output as a PNG)
5. Open the previous WORD template
6. VIEW > HEADER/FOOTER
7. Delete the image used previously
8. INSERT > PICTURE > FROM FILE
9. Select your PNG
10. Image will fall at the top/right corner of page
11. Double-click the image and select BEHIND TEXT hit OK
12. Set image height to 10.25” width (make sure aspect ratio is selected)
13. Center the image on the page
14. VIEW > (uncheck) HEADER/FOOTER
15. Double check that margins are as follows:
• Left: 2.8
• Right 0.5
• Header 0.35
• Top: 1.95
• Bottom: 0.5
• Footer: 0.25
16. Save document as .DOT file

Your margins etc may vary.

[Thorzdad]

Thanks, Andi.
That's more-or-less the approach I took. I gave-up the idea of having one set of margins on the front page, and a different set of margins throughout the rest of the document. To accomplish that, I had to dork around with section breaks, and that introduced other, more serious, issues...like a total re-formatting of the document if the user happened to delete a bunch of text that included a section break...something a user is bound to do. So, all the pages will have the same margin settings. No biggie.

I did discover a "first page only" setting that keeps the logo graphic exclusively on the first page. That was good to find.

But, gawdalmighty, Word is an overly complex and opaque app to work in. And I say that as a Photoshop and Illustrator user.

[andi*pandi]

::shakes fist in microsoft's general direction::